Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 1

Editors Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax put the call out to horror writers and editors of extreme stories, the hardcore stuff that breaks boundaries and trashes taboos, the transgressive tales you can't "unread" (as Chuck Palahniuk says). Some of the stories you'll find here are loaded with very graphic descriptions of violence, sex, and depravities, while others may contain only one shocking moment of brutality. In others, the hardcore aspect may be less graphic and subtler than you might expect.

Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Spanning over 20 years, 20 masters and modern authors of hardcore horror share their most bad-ass stories in this special edition from Comet Press. Many hard to find and out of print, some that were banned, Necro Files covers every imaginable mode of mayhem including serial killers, necrophilia, cannibals, werewolves, zombies, sex fetishes, psychopaths, snuff, occult, and more stories that dial into the dark side of human nature.

Certain Dark Things

In her debut short story collection, M.J. Pack offers up a new breed of terror sure to delight any true horror fan. Don’t miss out on tales of telepathic twins, a campfire ghost story gone terribly wrong, pills that induce life-threatening nightmares, and the disturbing new sideshow at Coney Island: Lady Alligator. Take a haunting trip down infamous Bubblehead Road and follow Danny around the country as he’s pursued by unseen (and unrelenting) creatures.

Cold Moon over Babylon: Valancourt 20th Century Classics

Welcome to Babylon, a typical sleepy Alabama small town, where years earlier the Larkin family suffered a terrible tragedy. Now they are about to endure another: 14-year-old Margaret Larkin will be robbed of her innocence and her life by a killer who is beyond the reach of the law. But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue, a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of a kitchen sink, graves erupt from the local cemetery in an implacable march of terror.

13 Nightmares

Thirteen tales of original terror penned in the dead of the night with only the glow of a computer for light. The collection of short stories runs the gamut of horror. Within its bloody minutes you will find a slasher clown, a blood red church, a little girl locked in a closet, a haunted sex doll, etc. 13 Nightmares is a fine collection of terror for the short story lover, but be warned. Some of these stores are not for the faint of heart. Do you dare enter a world where the supernatural, the macabre, and the horrific collide?

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo - and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

Lucie Blackman - tall, blond, 21 years old - stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000 and disappeared. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave. The seven months in between had seen a massive search for the missing girl involving Japanese policemen, British private detectives, and Lucie’s desperate but bitterly divided parents. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult or snatched by human traffickers? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? And what did her work as a hostess in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo really involve?

The Woman

The Woman is the powerful story of the last survivor of a feral tribe of cannibals who have been terrorizing the East Coast - from Maine into Canada - for years now. Badly wounded in a battle with police, a woman takes refuge in a cave overlooking the sea. Christopher Cleek is a slick, amoral - and unstable - country lawyer who, out hunting one day, sees her bathing in a stream. Fascinated, he follows her to her cave. Cleek has many dark secrets and to these he'll add another....

The Girl Next Door

Suburbia. Shady, tree-lined streets; well-tended lawns; and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark, damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, torturous deaths.

The Consultant

CompWare is in serious trouble after a promised merger falls through, so they do what other businesses have done to bolster their public image: They hire a consulting firm to review and streamline their business practices.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

In this deeply scary and intensely unnerving debut novel, Jake and a woman known only as "The Girlfriend" are on a drive to visit his parents at their secluded farm. But when Jake leaves "The Girlfriend" stranded at an abandoned high school, what follows is a twisted unraveling of the darkest unease, an exploration into psychological frailty, and an ending as suspenseful as The Usual Suspects and as haunting as Misery.

The Best Horror of the Year Volume Five

Darkness, both literal and psychological, holds its own unique fascination. Despite our fears, or perhaps because of them, listeners have always been drawn to tales of death, terror, madness, and the supernatural, and no more so than today when a wildly imaginative new generation of dark dreamers is carrying on in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft and King, crafting exquisitely disturbing literary nightmares that gaze without flinching into the abyss - and linger in the mind long after.

Dark Anonymous Confessions

They say that confession is necessary to purify the soul. However, there are some deeds that are so sinister, so wicked, that even the most remorseful admission of guilt is not enough to atone for them. From the mind of Vincent V. Cava comes his most twisted book to date: Nine frightening stories told through the voices of those who witnessed them.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories

A master storyteller at his best - the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story. Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King's finest gifts to his constant fan. "I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."

Webcam: A Novel of Terror

Someone is stalking webcam models. He lurks in the untouchable recesses of the black web. He's watching you. Right now. When watching is no longer enough, he comes calling. He's the last thing you'll ever see before the blood gets in your eyes.

The Elementals

After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand. But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty. Inside, something deadly lies in wait.

Burnt Offerings: Valancourt 20th Century Classics

Ben and Marian Rolfe are desperate to escape a stifling summer in their tiny Brooklyn apartment, so when they get the chance to rent a mansion in upstate New York for the entire summer for only $900, it's an offer that's too good to refuse. There's only one catch: behind a strange and intricately carved door in a distant wing of the house lives elderly Mrs. Allardyce, and the Rolfes will be responsible for preparing her meals. But Mrs. Allardyce never seems to emerge from her room, and it soon becomes clear that something weird and terrifying is happening in the house.

Off Season

September. A beautiful New York editor retreats to a lonely cabin on a hill in the quiet Maine beach town of Dead River - off season - awaiting her sister and friends. Nearby, a savage human family with a taste for flesh lurks in the darkening woods, watching, waiting for the moon to rise and night to fall.

Warped: A Menapace Collection of Short Horror, Thriller, and Suspense Fiction

From tales of chilling horror, to heart-stopping stories of suspense, Warped is best-selling author Jeff Menapace's ultimate collection of short fiction. Warped contains currently published tales of the macabre like "Princess" and "The Straw Man and a Murder", the currently out of print and award-winning "Sugar Daddy" and its sequel, "Sugar Daddy 2", and the author's preferred version of his controversial "Torment".

Beware

Using ancient black magic, a dangerous, vindictive maniac is made all-powerful by his ability to become invisible. Raping and murdering his way around the States, he is biding his time before fulfilling his one desire - to get even with the high school belle who rejected him years before.

Brides of the Impaler

When a new couple moves into a New York brownstone, they find their ultimate dream house...until they go into the basement. Suddenly, a macabre nun is seen lurking about, with an entourage of lewd and gibbering homeless women who seem to KNOW what evil secret lurks in the bowels of the old house. As the couples' dreams turn to lust-stained nightmares, and the bodies of missing persons are found impaled, the basement's secret is revealed at last: the remnants of Dracula himself...

A Winter Haunting

A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage - and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween, he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation.

A Head Full of Ghosts

The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when 14-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession.

Blister

They call her Blister. She's a hideously disfigured 23-year-old woman, living in a shed next to her father's house, hidden away from the world. Jason Tray is a successful cartoonist, banished to his agent's lakeside cabin for a few days of mandatory rest and relaxation. One night, while hanging out with a couple of the locals at a dive bar, he takes them up on their offer to go "see Blister," having no idea what they're talking about.

Publisher's Summary

For a very long time, Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee have followed their separate paths of line-crossing, gut-wrenching, no holds-barred storytelling. Now, those roads have drawn close and merged for a collection of five collaborative stories guaranteed to shock, amuse, disgust, and bring lovers of extreme fiction back for more. Along with the five stories, the authors have each included the first draft of one of their stories, showing the rough-base that becomes the foundation for their fiction, and giving listeners a good chance at separating their voices in the collaborations.

Replace the word cat in the title. I just want you to know when I say this is porn, you don't think I am kidding. Let me also mention that all holes are licked and poked and described in detail. This is porn.THE DEAD ARE PEOPLE TOOIf you can get past the porn part, let me say I really enjoyed three of the seven stories. Two of the stories were the first draft of two of the stories we already heard. If you are wanting to learn how to write and want to know the difference between a first draft and a finished product, that might interest you, but for the average reader it was disappointing to basically have two stories repeated.EYES LEFTEyes Left is a different and interesting zombie story.ALL THAT BEAUTY AND DIVERSITYJohn Lee is a great narrator

When two hardcore horror writers do a collaboration "just for fun," you get a no-holes-barred (there's a dirty pun in there) sexy, crunchy, bloody, twisted, good time. I wanted ten more of these stories.

Ed Lee and Jack Ketchum are two of my favorite horror authors and this is an interesting collaboration. Two of the rough draft stories are included and it is interesting to compare them before and after collaboration.